Jesus would have fallen foul of the Health and Safety laws
if he had been around today,
and I imagine it would have been hard for him to advertise on TV.
Just imagine someone saying today:
‘Come and follow me, and the chances are you will be spat upon,
thumped, sworn at, and maybe killed!’
His activities and those of his disciples would have fallen foul of various regulations.
His disciples would have had to wear safety helmets and waterproof coats,
if not body armour for a start,
and no one would have given them Accident at Work Insurance cover.
Just imagine seeing an advert on TV:
‘Join our group. You will get no wages
and your family and friends will probably turn against you and stop speaking to you.
You will get the chance to travel,
but usually to places where people will chase you out of their towns.’
The Army recruitment adverts don’t say:
‘Join the Army and get shot by a sniper or blown up by a roadside bomb’.
They stress the adventure, the comradeship,
and the contribution recruits would make to this country’s security.
But Jesus made no such nice promises to those who followed him in the beginning,
and he makes no nice promises to those who follow him today.
As I said last week, if you want to walk on the wide, enjoyable and popular way,
do NOT follow Jesus,
because he wants his followers to walk on the narrow, often unpopular and hard way.
He even said, in Mark 8:34,’ If anyone would come after me, (meaning join him),
he, and she, must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’.
You want a quiet life; you want lots of friends;
you want people to think nice things about you:
DON’T become a Christian!
There should be a ‘Health Warning’ on our doors
like those on cigarette packets and medicine bottles;
saying something like: ‘Beware, becoming a follower of Jesus could shorten your life’.
In Matthew 10:1 we read how out of all the people who had been following him
since he was baptised by John and had started preaching and teaching and healing, and after he had preached his Sermon on the Mount,
that Jesus ‘called to him his 12 disciples’;
and in Matthew 10 verse 5 we read how ‘these 12 Jesus sent out,
instructing them to proclaim ‘the kingdom of heaven is at hand’,
not too different from the message preached by John the Baptist,
the message of the need for repentance,
before the coming judgement,
except that there is no record of them baptising sinners who repented.
In Matthew 10:16 Jesus sends them out with a warning:
‘Behold. I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves;
so be shrewd, or wise, as serpents and innocent as doves’.
In Luke 10:1-3 it is recorded how:
The Lord appointed 72 others and sent them on ahead of him, 2 by 2,
into every town and place where he himself was about to go.
And before they set off, he said to them:
‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.
Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest
to send out labourers into his harvest.
Go your way; behold, I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.’
His metaphor, ‘Sheep in the midst of wolves’ is appropriate
because Jesus did require his disciples to go into dangerous environments.
In Acts we have three examples:
in chapter 5 verses 17 and 18:
‘Then the high priest and all his associates,
who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy.
They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail’.
In chapter 7 we read about one of the newly-appointed Deacons, Stephen,
preaching to the Jews,
and in verse 54 it says: ‘When they heard this, they were furious,
and gnashed their teeth at him’;
then verses 57 – 60:
‘yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him,
dragged him out of the city and began to stone him’
until he died.
Then in Acts chapter 9 it is recorded how Paul had not been a Christian for very long
before Jews in Damascus conspired to kill him,
and they would have if the Christians had not took him under cover of darkness
and lowered him out of the city in a laundry basket.
Jesus told his followers then, and he tells us now,
to ‘Be shrewd or as wise as serpents’
meaning we must exercise discretion and good judgement;
we must think before we speak or act.
We have to do this, just as Christians have always had to do it;
whether those around us are Roman Caesars or Nazi dictators or Communist dictators
or advocates of Homosexual marriage,
or the Human Right of gays or lesbians to be ministers or bishops
in what is supposed to be God’s church.
It doesn’t mean we should compromise;
and it certainly does not mean that we deny Christ or the Gospel,
only that we do not go looking for trouble.
We do not need to; the devil will make sure it comes our way in one form or another!
There have always been enemies of the Gospel,
ever since Adam and Eve walked in the Garden of Eden,
and there always will be until Jesus returns and consigns them to the pit of eternal fire.
Jesus told his first followers, and he tells us, to be ‘Innocent as doves’,
by which he means not retaliating; not rendering evil for evil done to us,
but turning the other cheek; walking away from abuse;
praying for those who persecute us.
Christians have suffered down through the centuries;
killed by lions and bears and gladiators in the Roman arenas,
gassed along with Jews in Belsen and Auchwitz,
imprisoned in the Gulags in Siberia
tortured behind the Bamboo Curtain even today,
and stoned to death by Muslim fundamentalists in Pakistan.
As a ‘big softie’ I have always hoped that I could find a verse in the Bible
where it says: ‘All who become Christians live happily ever after’,
but there is no such verse.
We will ‘live happily’ with God in heaven if we die before the Second Coming
and in a resurrection body thereafter,
but there is no guarantee of an easy, comfortable life in between.
In fact Jesus often says just the opposite:
the Christian life is a hard life, a lonely life, maybe even a shorter life
than one could have had.
Can I share with an excerpt from the closing pages of ‘Luther: his life and work’
by Gerhard Ritter:
‘In this, the most difficult of all tasks which confront the Christian,
namely in his relationships with the world,
they can and will take Luther’s attitude as a model for their own.’
‘At times the task (that is of reforming the corrupt Roman Catholic Church
into an evangelical and God-fearing one)
seemed completely hopeless to him.’
‘He wrote: ‘We serve here in an inn where the devil is master
and the world keeps house,
and where the servants are every conceivable sort of vice,
and all of them are enemies of the Gospel’.’
‘But does Luther ever think of running away from this terrible house’
and retiring into a quiet, monastic existence?
‘No, he behaves he like a true warrior, steadfast in the fight
in spite of the certainty that he will never be able to drive the devil out of the house.’
‘Whereas many of his supporters kept their heads down and their mouths shut,
as many Christians have done through the centuries,
‘his struggles were inspired by his zeal for the holiness of the Lord,
and for the true understanding of the divine revelation (of the Gospel).’
‘Without his faith he would never have had the strength
(to take on the spiritual and temporal leaders of the world,
on the one hand the Pope in Rome, and on the other, the Emperor Charles V)’
but he did, and succeeded, the Evangelical Church was established
and still stands for the Gospel
because ‘the power of his character and the creative achievement of his thought,
has its root in the same mysterious depths: in the encounter of the believer with God. Because he is sure that God calls him, he knows no fear
in his battle for his life’s work (for the Gospel and the Kingdom of God).’
This is why when he was opposed by Catholics,
tyrannical and greedy German princes
who just saw the Protestant Reformation only as a way of getting their hands
on Church money, land and property,
and by heretics who would have turned Christianity into a humanistic sect,
Luther could say, could shout:
‘Here I stand. I can no other. God help me! Amen.’
We are in a battle today;
a war between the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness;
there is no Middle Way; we either serve god or Mammon;
we are sheep, living and working, driving and shopping, among wolves,
and in this battle there will be casualties.
But the ‘good news’ is in Luke 10 verse 17 where it is recorded:
‘The 72 returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord,
even the demons are subject to us in your name!’
We are on the winning side; we have the victory through Christ Jesus.
May God protect us and strengthen us
and help us to persevere in the faith;
in Jesus’ name. Amen.
